Feminist discourse is evolving and a new wave of feminist consciousness is appearing in the media, in political debates, and in the classroom. I teach literature at a community college in Las Vegas, ...
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Feminist discourse is evolving and a new wave of feminist consciousness is appearing in the media, in political debates, and in the classroom. I teach literature at a community college in Las Vegas, where the students are similar to the “common readers” of Woolf’s Morley College in their desire to educate themselves, in their educational preparedness, and in their socioeconomic circumstances. Many of my students work as entertainers on The Strip and throughout my four years of teaching in Sin City, I have observed that my female students who work in the sex entertainment industry take a special interest in Woolf’s work. These students connect their concerns about female independence, sexual assault, pay inequality, and body-shaming, with Woolf’s feminist writings. Many of these women strongly identify with Woolf’s declarations of independence in A Room of One’s Own, as well as some of her most radical philosophies, such as her proclamation in Three Guineas that, “to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body.” Woolf speaks to and for these women in unique ways, and their responses to her work reflect a new, fourth wave feminist awareness. This study considers emerging, fourth wave feminist readings of Woolf both in theory and in practice. I wish to share the unique experience of teaching Woolf’s work to college students who identify as sex-entertainment workers, and highlight ways that these contemporary women are using Woolf’s work to create a new feminist heritage.Less

Teaching Virginia Woolf in Sin City: Vegas Entertainers and a New Feminist Heritage

Kaylee Baucom

Published in print: 2018-01-01

Feminist discourse is evolving and a new wave of feminist consciousness is appearing in the media, in political debates, and in the classroom. I teach literature at a community college in Las Vegas, where the students are similar to the “common readers” of Woolf’s Morley College in their desire to educate themselves, in their educational preparedness, and in their socioeconomic circumstances. Many of my students work as entertainers on The Strip and throughout my four years of teaching in Sin City, I have observed that my female students who work in the sex entertainment industry take a special interest in Woolf’s work. These students connect their concerns about female independence, sexual assault, pay inequality, and body-shaming, with Woolf’s feminist writings. Many of these women strongly identify with Woolf’s declarations of independence in A Room of One’s Own, as well as some of her most radical philosophies, such as her proclamation in Three Guineas that, “to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body.” Woolf speaks to and for these women in unique ways, and their responses to her work reflect a new, fourth wave feminist awareness. This study considers emerging, fourth wave feminist readings of Woolf both in theory and in practice. I wish to share the unique experience of teaching Woolf’s work to college students who identify as sex-entertainment workers, and highlight ways that these contemporary women are using Woolf’s work to create a new feminist heritage.

‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time ...
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‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time Virginia Woolf’s narrator made this observation in the late 1920s, a number of her British and other European contemporary women writers were in fact passing by and indeed living among black women in one of Great Britain’s colonies, Kenya. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) was among the most famous, and her memoir Out of Africa (1937), commemorates her years on a Kenyan plantation (1914-1931). Along with the canonical Danish Dinesen were British women whose work has been long forgotten, including Nora K. Strange (1884-1974) and Florence Riddell (1885-1960), both of whom wrote what is called the “Kenya Novel.” The Kenya Novel is a subgenre of romantic fiction set in the white highlands of Britain’s Crown Colony Kenya. The titles alone—e.g., Kenya Calling (1928) and Courtship in Kenya (1932) by Strange, and Kismet in Kenya (1927) and Castles in Kenya (1929) by Riddell—give a flavor of their content. Because these novels were popular in Britain, it is very likely that Woolf knew about them, but she does not refer to them in her diaries, letters, or published writing. Even so, it would be worth testing this famous comment by a Room’s narrator about (white) women’s lack of propensity to recreate others in her own image, or more specifically, to dominate the colonial other. How do Woolf’s white contemporaries, living in Kenya, represent black women? Given that Strange and Riddell were part of the settler class, we can expect that their views reflect dominant colonial ideology. The formulaic nature of the Kenya Novel, and its focus on the lives of white settlers, also mean that the portrayal of the lives of the people whose lands were brutally expropriated would hardly be treated with respect or as little more than backdrops. Yet it is important to understand these other global contexts in which Woolf is working and the role that some of her contemporary women writers played in the shaping of them. This paper concludes with an overview of the separate legacies of Woolf and her fellow Anglo-African women writers up to the present day.Less

Kenya Colony and the Kenya Novel: The East African Heritage of “A Very Fine Negress” in A Room of One’s Own

Jeanne Dubino

Published in print: 2018-01-01

‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time Virginia Woolf’s narrator made this observation in the late 1920s, a number of her British and other European contemporary women writers were in fact passing by and indeed living among black women in one of Great Britain’s colonies, Kenya. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) was among the most famous, and her memoir Out of Africa (1937), commemorates her years on a Kenyan plantation (1914-1931). Along with the canonical Danish Dinesen were British women whose work has been long forgotten, including Nora K. Strange (1884-1974) and Florence Riddell (1885-1960), both of whom wrote what is called the “Kenya Novel.” The Kenya Novel is a subgenre of romantic fiction set in the white highlands of Britain’s Crown Colony Kenya. The titles alone—e.g., Kenya Calling (1928) and Courtship in Kenya (1932) by Strange, and Kismet in Kenya (1927) and Castles in Kenya (1929) by Riddell—give a flavor of their content. Because these novels were popular in Britain, it is very likely that Woolf knew about them, but she does not refer to them in her diaries, letters, or published writing. Even so, it would be worth testing this famous comment by a Room’s narrator about (white) women’s lack of propensity to recreate others in her own image, or more specifically, to dominate the colonial other. How do Woolf’s white contemporaries, living in Kenya, represent black women? Given that Strange and Riddell were part of the settler class, we can expect that their views reflect dominant colonial ideology. The formulaic nature of the Kenya Novel, and its focus on the lives of white settlers, also mean that the portrayal of the lives of the people whose lands were brutally expropriated would hardly be treated with respect or as little more than backdrops. Yet it is important to understand these other global contexts in which Woolf is working and the role that some of her contemporary women writers played in the shaping of them. This paper concludes with an overview of the separate legacies of Woolf and her fellow Anglo-African women writers up to the present day.

“I am not Virginia Woolf,” a character exclaims in Lidia Yuknavitch’s award-winning novel The Small Backs of Children (2015). But who among us is? If we are women writers, particularly experimental ...
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“I am not Virginia Woolf,” a character exclaims in Lidia Yuknavitch’s award-winning novel The Small Backs of Children (2015). But who among us is? If we are women writers, particularly experimental women writers, Virginia Woolf’s legacy is profound and ongoing. Thus Yuknavitch’s main character, a woman writer troubled with a traumatic past, expresses her debt to Woolf with a bit of brash ambivalence: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. What a crock. Virginia, fuck you, old girl, old dead girl” (7). That these are the first words this character speaks in Small Backs belies her debt to Woolf’s influence. Indeed, Lidia Yuknavitch – a contemporary American writer and academic – has elsewhere spoken of Woolf as the “portal” through which Yuknavitch approaches her own writing. In this paper, I want to demonstrate the multiple and compelling ways in which Yukavitch’s most recent novel is indebted to the legacy of Virginia Woolf. The Small Backs of Children is an experimental, sometimes challenging novel that defies generic conventions. As in Woolf’s Three Guineas, The Small Backs of Children takes as its subject the impact of war and violence on the bodies of women and girls. As in Woolf’s The Waves, each character takes turns recounting their part of the narrative, while their multiple voices together create a collective consciousness greater than any single perspective. Further, as in Woolf’s theory of biography, Yuknavitch mixes the “granite and rainbow” of fact and fiction to craft a story that is a groundbreaking mixture of the two. Indeed, in the example of The Small Backs of Children, we see a compelling example of a 21st century woman writer thinking back through Virginia Woolf.Less

Thinking Back through Virginia Woolf: Woolf as Portal in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children

Catherine W. Hollis

Published in print: 2018-01-01

“I am not Virginia Woolf,” a character exclaims in Lidia Yuknavitch’s award-winning novel The Small Backs of Children (2015). But who among us is? If we are women writers, particularly experimental women writers, Virginia Woolf’s legacy is profound and ongoing. Thus Yuknavitch’s main character, a woman writer troubled with a traumatic past, expresses her debt to Woolf with a bit of brash ambivalence: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. What a crock. Virginia, fuck you, old girl, old dead girl” (7). That these are the first words this character speaks in Small Backs belies her debt to Woolf’s influence. Indeed, Lidia Yuknavitch – a contemporary American writer and academic – has elsewhere spoken of Woolf as the “portal” through which Yuknavitch approaches her own writing. In this paper, I want to demonstrate the multiple and compelling ways in which Yukavitch’s most recent novel is indebted to the legacy of Virginia Woolf. The Small Backs of Children is an experimental, sometimes challenging novel that defies generic conventions. As in Woolf’s Three Guineas, The Small Backs of Children takes as its subject the impact of war and violence on the bodies of women and girls. As in Woolf’s The Waves, each character takes turns recounting their part of the narrative, while their multiple voices together create a collective consciousness greater than any single perspective. Further, as in Woolf’s theory of biography, Yuknavitch mixes the “granite and rainbow” of fact and fiction to craft a story that is a groundbreaking mixture of the two. Indeed, in the example of The Small Backs of Children, we see a compelling example of a 21st century woman writer thinking back through Virginia Woolf.

This chapter perceives the connections between natural imagery and war in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1931) and Willa Cather's One of Ours. Both novels critique the visual propaganda of World War ...
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This chapter perceives the connections between natural imagery and war in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1931) and Willa Cather's One of Ours. Both novels critique the visual propaganda of World War 1 through metaphoric representations of nature. Although the writers were not personally acquainted, Woolf contextualized Cather's work in “American Fiction,” while Cather judged A Room of One's Own (1929) to be an accurate account of the challenges faced by some women writers. Additionally, the argument of Cather's essay “The Novel Demeuble,” is indebted to Woolf's insistence in “Modern Fiction” that novelists should only sparingly represent material reality. Each novelist also researched conditions at the French front, and each disapproved of the distortions on which visual and verbal government wartime propaganda depended.Less

The Besieged Garden : Nature in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather’s One of Ours

Jane Lilienfeld

Published in print: 2011-06-01

This chapter perceives the connections between natural imagery and war in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1931) and Willa Cather's One of Ours. Both novels critique the visual propaganda of World War 1 through metaphoric representations of nature. Although the writers were not personally acquainted, Woolf contextualized Cather's work in “American Fiction,” while Cather judged A Room of One's Own (1929) to be an accurate account of the challenges faced by some women writers. Additionally, the argument of Cather's essay “The Novel Demeuble,” is indebted to Woolf's insistence in “Modern Fiction” that novelists should only sparingly represent material reality. Each novelist also researched conditions at the French front, and each disapproved of the distortions on which visual and verbal government wartime propaganda depended.

Much has been written and discussed about Woolf's eating disorders, her fear and loathing of food, and refusal to eat properly (or at all) when she was ill. This chapter shows that Woolf also had a ...
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Much has been written and discussed about Woolf's eating disorders, her fear and loathing of food, and refusal to eat properly (or at all) when she was ill. This chapter shows that Woolf also had a vivid appreciation for food, in both her personal enjoyment and appreciation of it and her use of it in her novels and essays, letters, and diaries. Her priorities, her loves, were writing and reading, her friends and family, and her daily life, which included her walks, nature, and food. She writes about what she eats as a way of expressing contentment. Food was comfort, a quiet pleasure, like a warm fire or a brisk walk. She recognizes the potential for the picturesque and the humorous as well as the layered meanings in her use of food imagery to describe people, to demonstrate character, and to set a stage. This would not be possible without an underlying appreciation and enjoyment. Her work reflects this, perhaps most notably in A Room of One's Own, when she compares the meals at the men's and women's colleges.Less

“A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage” : Dining Well in Virginia Woolf’s Life and Work

Alice Lowe

Published in print: 2011-06-01

Much has been written and discussed about Woolf's eating disorders, her fear and loathing of food, and refusal to eat properly (or at all) when she was ill. This chapter shows that Woolf also had a vivid appreciation for food, in both her personal enjoyment and appreciation of it and her use of it in her novels and essays, letters, and diaries. Her priorities, her loves, were writing and reading, her friends and family, and her daily life, which included her walks, nature, and food. She writes about what she eats as a way of expressing contentment. Food was comfort, a quiet pleasure, like a warm fire or a brisk walk. She recognizes the potential for the picturesque and the humorous as well as the layered meanings in her use of food imagery to describe people, to demonstrate character, and to set a stage. This would not be possible without an underlying appreciation and enjoyment. Her work reflects this, perhaps most notably in A Room of One's Own, when she compares the meals at the men's and women's colleges.

This chapter offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, focusing on the four Marys in the novel. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three Marys: Mary ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, focusing on the four Marys in the novel. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three Marys: Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael. The narrator also hints that we may also call Mary “George,” as in Hamilton. The chapter then cites the historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf's text. While scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish Ballad narrated by Mary Hamilton, the chapter here raises the possibility that Woolf may have also been influenced by Henry Fielding's fictionalized 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement, with lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton as the protagonist. It also suggests that Woolf counters Fielding's patriarchal views by endorsing her own Sapphism and the expression of female sexual desire.Less

Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One’s Own : The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies and Calculated Cross-Dressing

Vara S. Neverow

Published in print: 2012-06-01

This chapter offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, focusing on the four Marys in the novel. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three Marys: Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael. The narrator also hints that we may also call Mary “George,” as in Hamilton. The chapter then cites the historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf's text. While scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish Ballad narrated by Mary Hamilton, the chapter here raises the possibility that Woolf may have also been influenced by Henry Fielding's fictionalized 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement, with lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton as the protagonist. It also suggests that Woolf counters Fielding's patriarchal views by endorsing her own Sapphism and the expression of female sexual desire.

This chapter examines the experimental poetry of Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James, Frances Presley and Redell Olsen. It begins by considering the importance of visual presentation and sound ...
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This chapter examines the experimental poetry of Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James, Frances Presley and Redell Olsen. It begins by considering the importance of visual presentation and sound performance in the work of Bergvall, particularly Éclat (1996) and Goan Atom (2001). It then offers a reading of Neither the One nor the Other, a collaboration between James and Presley, and its emphasis on performance, performativity, blurred identities, and virtuality. It also explores how Neither the One nor the Other evokes and circulates a range of meanings around and within history, language, religion and environment. Finally, it analyses Olsen’s Secure Portable Space (2004) and its exploration of textual and virtual spaces.Less

David KennedyChristine Kennedy

Published in print: 2013-12-15

This chapter examines the experimental poetry of Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth James, Frances Presley and Redell Olsen. It begins by considering the importance of visual presentation and sound performance in the work of Bergvall, particularly Éclat (1996) and Goan Atom (2001). It then offers a reading of Neither the One nor the Other, a collaboration between James and Presley, and its emphasis on performance, performativity, blurred identities, and virtuality. It also explores how Neither the One nor the Other evokes and circulates a range of meanings around and within history, language, religion and environment. Finally, it analyses Olsen’s Secure Portable Space (2004) and its exploration of textual and virtual spaces.

While the donkey is a figure of toil, it is also a figure of fun. This essay will explore how the donkey bears both of these associations vividly in Virginia Woolf’s writing. It is in their labor ...
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While the donkey is a figure of toil, it is also a figure of fun. This essay will explore how the donkey bears both of these associations vividly in Virginia Woolf’s writing. It is in their labor that donkeys most often inhabit Woolf’s imagination through hundreds of mentions in her writing in all genres. Woolf associates their work with the work of the writer. Although Woolf generally uses “donkey work” as a somewhat dismissive term, this essay examines the “donkey work” that the ubiquitous donkey does in Woolf’s writing. Throughout Woolf’s work, donkeys function as figures of humor, ordinariness, or suffering and their often peripheral placement is itself significant. Woolf’s donkeys are never central; rather, they are pervasively marginal. This paper focuses primarily on Woolf’s donkeys as they appear in several of her essays and in Between the Acts (1941).Less

“And the donkey brays”: Donkeys at Work in Virginia Woolf

Elizabeth Hanna Hanson

Published in print: 2015-09-01

While the donkey is a figure of toil, it is also a figure of fun. This essay will explore how the donkey bears both of these associations vividly in Virginia Woolf’s writing. It is in their labor that donkeys most often inhabit Woolf’s imagination through hundreds of mentions in her writing in all genres. Woolf associates their work with the work of the writer. Although Woolf generally uses “donkey work” as a somewhat dismissive term, this essay examines the “donkey work” that the ubiquitous donkey does in Woolf’s writing. Throughout Woolf’s work, donkeys function as figures of humor, ordinariness, or suffering and their often peripheral placement is itself significant. Woolf’s donkeys are never central; rather, they are pervasively marginal. This paper focuses primarily on Woolf’s donkeys as they appear in several of her essays and in Between the Acts (1941).

In regard to Virginia Woolf’s merit as a composition theorist and her conception of imagined audiences, this essay offers three arguments. First, Woolf foresaw many of the concerns about imagined ...
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In regard to Virginia Woolf’s merit as a composition theorist and her conception of imagined audiences, this essay offers three arguments. First, Woolf foresaw many of the concerns about imagined audience that would eventually interest modern composition theorists. Second, Woolf’s conceptualization of the writer’s relationship to audience is revealed through study of both her fiction and nonfiction. Finally, the writer/audience relationship that Woolf illuminates is helpful for teaching students and complements the goals of composition as a field. This essay uses the following Woolf texts to engage these arguments: Between the Acts, Jacob’s Room, “Professions for Women,” A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, “Women and Fiction,” and A Writer’s Diary.Less

Kelle Sills Mullineaux

Published in print: 2015-09-01

In regard to Virginia Woolf’s merit as a composition theorist and her conception of imagined audiences, this essay offers three arguments. First, Woolf foresaw many of the concerns about imagined audience that would eventually interest modern composition theorists. Second, Woolf’s conceptualization of the writer’s relationship to audience is revealed through study of both her fiction and nonfiction. Finally, the writer/audience relationship that Woolf illuminates is helpful for teaching students and complements the goals of composition as a field. This essay uses the following Woolf texts to engage these arguments: Between the Acts, Jacob’s Room, “Professions for Women,” A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, “Women and Fiction,” and A Writer’s Diary.

This chapter considers the implications of the canine in Woolf's urban contact zones where dogs and their people interact. Woolf rhetorically remodifies patriarchal and racist dog tropes to the point ...
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This chapter considers the implications of the canine in Woolf's urban contact zones where dogs and their people interact. Woolf rhetorically remodifies patriarchal and racist dog tropes to the point of Benjaminian allegorical ruin, refiguring and resignifying them, turning them to feminist advantage. She also ventriloquises her feminist manifesto, A Room of One's Own (1929), as a dog-woman, who may be understood as a woman who seems to inhabit a canine morphology, or one who seems to haunt the margins between human subjectivity and canid animality, or one who is used to being treated or figured as a dog. The chapter asks: what happens to modernist writing when the impure get their paws on it? What kind of subjectivities are inscribed or produced in the urban contact zones where Woolf's chimerical canines encounter humanity?Less

Jane Goldman

Published in print: 2010-09-01

This chapter considers the implications of the canine in Woolf's urban contact zones where dogs and their people interact. Woolf rhetorically remodifies patriarchal and racist dog tropes to the point of Benjaminian allegorical ruin, refiguring and resignifying them, turning them to feminist advantage. She also ventriloquises her feminist manifesto, A Room of One's Own (1929), as a dog-woman, who may be understood as a woman who seems to inhabit a canine morphology, or one who seems to haunt the margins between human subjectivity and canid animality, or one who is used to being treated or figured as a dog. The chapter asks: what happens to modernist writing when the impure get their paws on it? What kind of subjectivities are inscribed or produced in the urban contact zones where Woolf's chimerical canines encounter humanity?